Defense IT Summit: How the US is using AI and tech to build a better defense system

Last week, GovCIO kicked off its Defense IT Summit in Arlington, Virginia, bringing together industry professionals, federal directors, and technical officers in the cybersecurity, AI, and defense spaces to discuss strategy and developments.

IT Brew rounded up a few highlights from the summit, which held sessions on cloud security, tech priorities for defense missions, and what’s next for AI and the machine learning wave.

“What you see across all the commercial industry is that the world has changed from how we’ve approached development, how we’ve approached IT. You know, the quote that we are in a software-defined world is absolutely true and increasingly so,” said Rob Vietmeyer, chief software officer at the Department of Defense (DOD), in a discussion on software development advancements.

In an open Q&A session, Vietmeyer told IT Brew he and his team are investing in software that allows them to standardize and harden media containers—a process that helps discover and eliminate potential vulnerabilities.

“We have infrastructures, code deployments that can stand up cloud environments,” he said. “We have infrastructure, code deployments that can stand up pipelines for people—those tools include extensions specific for the AI space.”

The Army and other US agencies have integrated AI into the workplace for efficiency. By automating routine tasks as well as data analysis, soldiers can focus on making high-level decisions while being intentional about "strategy on the battlefield," Angel Phaneuf, CISO of Army Software Factory, said in a lightning round session on AI and machine learning (ML).

“Where automation reduces cognitive load, AI/ML alleviates that burden on our warfighters,” she said.

Leslie Beavers, the principal deputy chief information officer of the DOD, was also a featured speaker in a fireside chat on tech priorities for defense. When IT Brew asked about defense against state-sponsored attacks coming from China, she emphasized that this is one of the biggest priorities for her team, noting the importance of collaboration.

“Cybersecurity and that kind of defense isn’t something that the DOD can do by itself,” she said. “It’s not something that cyber defenders can do by themselves. When we think of cybersecurity, we have to think of it like we do our personal security.”

That means everyone must be “active participants,” she added, saying that people need to protect their “information in a way that is unprecedented—so, that’s why I say that from an IT perspective defending the nation.”

Chinese state-sponsored attackers have targeted critical infrastructure in the US, but she said their schemes also affecting the general public—and US companies.

“And that is part of the reason why TikTok was highlighted as a vulnerability, because information is being gathered and exploited in ways that it hasn’t before. So, from that perspective, there’s a general target. Companies are targets,” she said.